WoW.. I am so excited that Detroit Pistons beat the Cavs in the 2nd round of the Playoffs after a grueling 7 game series with them. Man.. did that Lebron guy give us a scare or what??
Anyway.. recently, I was working with a customer on their B2B/EDI implementation for an automotive company in Detroit here. They had Inovis (with only one n.. I always get that wrong with two n’s), previously known as Harbinger, I think. Anyway, they have recently decided to migrate from Invois to IBM’s WebSphere Partner Gateway (WPG). IBM’s WebSphere Partner Gateway provides an end-to-end consolidated B2B gateway for trading partner community integration or the so called B2B integration.
We will soon be migrating all their Invois EDI maps to WDI (WebSphere Data Interchange). One of the reason why they decided to migrate in the first place is because of the monthly VAN costs and other maintenance costs for Inovis. Though Inovis is a great product, if you want to integrate this product within the enterprise, you have to go to another vendor (again like IBM or TIBCO or webMethods). They evaluated vendors who could provide an entire portfolio in a single stack and took this step to move to IBM’s WPG, which will eventually be integrated with IBM’s WebSphere Process server (WPS) for Process integration.
Recently IBM has bough Ascential, you probably heard that, which actually bought Mercator earlier. Now Mercator is known within the IBM product portfolio as WebSphere DataStage TX. This is a very popular tool for EDI mapping and has been very successful with over 7000 customers in the last 10 years. I personally feel that this is a very good alternative to WDI. I wonder what IBM would do with WDI. Would they replace that with TX in the WPG suite? Let’s wait and see.
Come back for more information on this one. I will do some more research on this area and will post on this one.
Cheers,
Steve Lokam